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Thank you for covering for my laziness and short attention span. That information is news to me and quite fascinating.

It was shocking to me when I first discovered it. I had never been taught anything like that in history. I had always been told the Republicans were against slavery, and slavery was the reason for the war. The facts surrounding the Corwin amendment demonstrate that they were perfectly willing to tolerate slavery in order to hang onto the Southern states.

I asked my Copilot, part of Window’s Edge,”When did the US civl war start?”

It replied, “The U.S. Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina.” That sounds like the conventional answer.

That's the pat answer that everyone is taught. What is never mentioned is the fact that in March, Lincoln issued orders for a fleet of warships to be assembled to force a confrontation with the Confederates surrounding Sumter.

I think the first ships of the fleet left around April 1, and their orders were to wait for the arrival of captain Mercer in the Powhatan, and he was to take control of the fleet and issue an ultimatum to the Confederates. If they refused to comply, he was ordered to use his entire force to place both troops and supplies into Fort Sumter.

From memory, the ships were Powhatan, Pocahontas, Pawnee, Yankee, Harriet Lane, Thomas Freeborn, Uncle Ben, and the Baltic, which carried troops and munitions.

Every member of Lincoln's cabinet told him that if he sent those ships, it would start a civil war.

The fleet's orders had been sent by spies to the confederates, and they knew they were coming. This was why they were urging Major Anderson to evacuate the fort.

When the Harriet Lane arrived at the entrance to Charleston harbor and fired shots at the "Nashville", CSA General Beauregard sent word to Major Anderson informing him that the rest of the fleet would soon be arriving, and if Anderson would give his word that the Fort would remain neutral in any conflict between Beauregard's troops and the ships that had come to attack them, Beauregard would refrain from firing on Sumter.

Anderson refused to agree, and sent back a message to Beauregard saying that if he fired on any of those ships, Anderson would fire upon him using the guns of Fort Sumter.

Beauregard responded that he was left with no choice but to commence an attack on the fort, and I think he said it would begin at 5:00 that morning. (April 12, 1861)

So the civil war actually began in March of 1861 when Lincoln issued orders to prepare those ships for attacking the confederates at Charleston.

Had those warships not been sent, Anderson would have evacuated the fort peacefully around the 14th of April, 1861. He had already written the evacuation order when the ships arrived.

What the Confederates didn't know is that Lincoln had pulled a trick. Without telling *ANYONE*, he sent Lieutenant David Dixon Porter with secret orders to take command of the Powhatan, relieve Captain Mercer of duty, and then sail the ship to Pensacola instead of Charleston. The Command ship would never arrive, and so those ships he sent to Charleston would be frozen in inaction, because Captain Mercer was never going to get there to take command of the fleet and commence the attack on the Confederates.

The Confederates thought those ships were really going to attack them, because that's exactly what their orders said they would do, so the Confederates treated the threat as if it were real, not knowing that Lincoln had paralyzed the expedition with the secret orders he had given to Lieutenant Porter. (Promoted to Admiral Porter during the course of the war.)

Yeah, Lincoln deliberately provoked it with those warships, but they never never never tell you about the warships sent to attack the confederates.

I know some think that the north’s fortifying of Fort Sumter constituted a threat to take control of the river.

Anderson seized fort Sumter in the middle of the night after Christmas in December of 1861. He had spiked and burned all the cannons at Ft. Moultrie, and the people of Charleston woke up to a hostile presence in the unfinished fort that was built to defend Charleston from attack by British ships.

Northern newspapers had called for the guns of Sumter to be turned on Charleston and to reduce the city to ashes until they complied with Federal collections of tariffs at their port. Anderson's men actually discussed turning the guns to attack Charleston, but they never actually did it.

As you say Lincoln urged the states to ratify the Corwin amendment in March, one month before the attack on Fort Sumter. If he meant to head-off the war, it seems to have been too little too late.

If Lincoln had simply refrained from deliberately provoking them, there wouldn't have been a war.

But Lincoln needed that war. Here is another thing most people don't know about the Civil War. The Southern states were producing 72% of the taxes that paid for the Federal government. 72% of the total revenue the Federal government received was created by Southern trade with Europe.

The value of the Southern portion of the European trade in 1860 was 200 million per year. This produced 65 million per year in tariff revenue for the Federal government.

With the South seceding, that money would disappear, and leave the government with a serious deficit, and of course they weren't going to allow that to happen.

Additionally, the South did 500 million in trade with the Northern states in 1860. With the absence of protectionist laws from the Union, much of that trade would go to Europe instead of the North. European products were better and cheaper than Northern produced products, and this is why the Congress imposed protectionist laws in order to make them more competitive.

Secession would cut trade with the North greatly. There were huge fortunes on the line for many Northern industrialists. If the South were allowed to leave and cut them out of the trade, it would bankrupt many of them.

And that's the real reason why there was a war.

You’ve convinced me that Republican hands were not completely clean on the topic of slavery. Yet, I still think the party was founded as an abolitionist party.

I used to believe that. I'm sure it's true for many of the 1860 Republicans, but I no longer believe it is true for most of them. How did they get those 2/3rds margins in the House and Senate? Apparently money was more important to them than slavery.